


What Wizards Do

by Miss_M



Category: In the Forests of Serre - Patricia A. McKillip
Genre: Domestic, Dreams, Gen, M/M, Magic, Post-Canon, Recovery, Travel, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:40:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21839116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: “I’m just a scribe.”“You are not ‘just’ anything, Euan Ash.”
Comments: 8
Kudos: 10
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	What Wizards Do

**Author's Note:**

  * For [masterofmidgets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterofmidgets/gifts).



> I own nothing.

Euan was dreaming.

He knew himself for a steady man, a man whose imagination was nourished as much as it was circumscribed by books, so it always caught him by surprise when his dreams took flight into realms he had never read nor heard about. That cold winter night, he dreamed he was a bird, or perhaps a fledgling dragon, gliding on the wind above a great ocean, its waters as green as old glass, the whitecaps gracing the waves like ephemeral crowns. His keen eye discerned porpoises below him, appearing and vanishing like shooting stars, but no hint of any island or shore in any direction he glanced. 

The flying Euan dipped, dove, and scattered the school of porpoises, his long, silver body skimming the waves, the cold spray clinging to his feathers – or were they scales? – for barely a fraction of a breath before it was whipped away by the wind, which Euan rode back up, high up, and woke up in his narrow bed in Unciel’s house.

Staying on after Unciel had awoken from his ordeal in Serre had seemed the only logical choice, as well as the only one Euan’s heart could abide. Proctor Verel had said nothing when informed of Euan’s decision, merely sniffed down his nose and up at the tall scribe, and wished him good luck with more sincerity than Euan had expected from the short, rotund proctor, so adept at shushing others and deciphering strange alphabets. 

Summer waned, autumn entered Unciel’s garden bursting with ripe fruit and root vegetables practically pleading to be dug up and stored in the cellar. Winter rimed the threshold and the windowpanes with frost by the time Unciel felt strong enough to leave his bed, sit in the kitchen, and watch Euan chop and grate and stir their lunch into existence, while the one-eyed cat napped on Unciel’s lap. 

The wizard remained too weak to do much more than scratch the cat’s ears or lift his spoon to his lips, but within the fortnight of his first visit to the kitchen, Unciel said, “I will go into the garden today.”

Euan nearly dropped his spoon. “Are you certain? I should fetch a stool for you, just in case.”

Unciel’s mouth worked, and Euan realized the wizard was attempting a smile, as though his face had forgotten how to fashion one during the long months he’d spent in bed, scarcely moving. 

“Your arm for me to lean on should suffice, I think,” Unciel replied.

Euan continued to harbor grave misgivings about this plan, but he offered his left arm to Unciel and matched his steps to Unciel’s, each one short as a sparrow’s hop and succeeding the previous as slowly as water cutting a path through stone. The first lasting frost lay upon the ground, the bushes bare of leaves, and the slightly crooked beds Euan had dug in autumn. His pen described always perfectly straight lines, but a hoe was a foreign tool in his hands. 

Unciel paused by the erratic garden beds, and Euan braced himself for gentle correction.

“Cabbages, carrots, beets,” Unciel murmured like he was reciting a spell, each word measured and precise.

Euan groped for a response before seizing upon: “Yes.”

Unciel lifted his head smoothly and quickly, with no apparent effort, and Euan’s heart skipped a beat to see it, the movement so easy and thoughtless, though Unciel still clung to Euan’s arm and leaned his weight all along Euan’s left side in order to remain upright. 

“You should put some hay down on the ground,” Unciel said, his eyes watching the sky thick with clouds. “It’ll snow tomorrow, and a hard frost will come on its heels.”

“I will,” Euan said. “I promise.” 

Suddenly it mattered a great deal to him not to kill Unciel’s winter vegetables, for he thought of them as Unciel’s, though he’d been the one to choose them, plant them, and care for them.

Unciel’s free hand touched Euan’s where it rested in the crook of Unciel’s elbow, trying to grip gently, to support firmly. 

“Thank you,” Unciel said, and Euan swallowed his heart back down his throat. 

That night, while outside fat snowflakes resembling white hens, their feathers ruffled in annoyance, fell in a thick curtain over the city, the royal palace, the empty streets, and Unciel’s slumbering garden, Euan dreamed of a castle. It stood on a cliff by an ocean, and was carved out of the cliff, soaring higher than the birds, and plunging deeper underground than the worms. It was magnificent and forbidding, or would have been but for the glimpses of many lives, many people’s stories unspooling within it: a bright blue carpet being shaken out of a high window, the voices of children raised shrilly many stories below, a caravan of donkeys bearing great baskets piled high with green vegetables up a switchback path carved into the cliffside. The flags snapping in the wind from turrets and battlements seemed to be waving to Euan, inviting him closer, not in deception but in innocence which feared nothing.

Euan awoke in his bed, in his room bathed in sunlight reflected off the fresh snow, rainbows shimmering on his coverlet and the wall behind his head. His heart ached with longing.

At breakfast, Unciel appeared in the kitchen doorway, both hands supporting him against the lintels, his slippered feet unsteady but his expression determined. The raven cawed a greeting, and Euan’s hands barely trembled as he moved Unciel’s bowl of porridge and his teacup from a tray to the table. 

Unciel did not eat much, but he drained his cup and asked for more. He studied the counter by the hearth while Euan got up to fetch more water for tea.

“What will you prepare?” Unciel asked, his eyes skimming over the head of cabbage, the handful of potatoes, the wilted beetroot like a desiccated heart. 

“I don’t know yet,” Euan replied. “I put together meals as I go along.”

Unciel hummed thoughtfully. “And for spice?”

Euan carried a jug of fresh, cold water to the hearth. “Salt, of course. Thyme, maybe. There are still some dried mushrooms and peppers left.”

Euan spoke lightly, hoping that Unciel would not notice how much he wanted his autodidactic cooking to please the wizard, and so his mind skipped along like a flat pebble over water, pausing on the clear water in the jug he held, the fire’s warmth intensifying as he approached the hearth, the wreaths of yellow mushrooms and red peppers hanging on the wall behind the chimney, the ceramic jar of salt…

He heard rather than saw Unciel smile, twice in two days: “So there is a method to it. Bring that water here, please.”

“It’s cold. Your tea…”

Unciel raised his hand and gestured. Again Euan was caught up in the seeming ease of Unciel’s movement, the thoughtlessness behind it, like the wizard no longer needed to concentrate on everything his body wished to do. He brought the water jug to the table, and Unciel laid his hand on its rounded side, then gestured with his eyes for Euan to do the same. Euan obeyed, wondering what they were doing, wondering if he should be holding the jug in a specific way and concentrating on it as hard as he could: the smooth ceramic, the slick blue glaze, the curve of it bellying out from the narrow neck…

“That’s enough.” Unciel’s voice interrupted Euan’s focus. Unciel nudged his teacup closer to the jug. “Please.”

Still understanding nothing but trusting that Unciel knew what he was about, Euan poured water into Unciel’s cup. The teacup steamed as it filled.

Euan gasped and gripped the jug with both hands, otherwise he might have spilled the hot water all over himself and Unciel. The jug felt predictably warm under his palms, and Euan wondered how he had failed to notice it before.

“You shouldn’t exert yourself,” he babbled. “You’re not strong enough to do magic yet!”

Unciel lifted his head from contemplating his teacup. His eyes, blue and clear, arrested the wild, rushing torrent of Euan’s words. 

“I am not certain which one of us did that,” Unciel said quietly. “Magic is primitive rather than learned. It exists everywhere, in everything and everyone, and manifests itself in different ways depending on the conduit.”

Euan remembered the rumors he’d heard about King Arnou’s disastrous attempts at harnessing the magic inherent in the royal line. He put the jug down on the table and dropped back into his chair. “I’m just a scribe,” he said, a meager plaint. 

Unciel’s eyes found his again. “You have learned to cook, and to care for a house and a garden, and to watch over a man in the grip of powerful sorcery, and to navigate the shoals of other people’s desires and, at the very least, to guide and enhance another’s magic, if not your own. You are not ‘just’ anything, Euan Ash.”

Euan could see that Unciel meant this as praise and reassurance, but it sounded more like judgment. He sought refuge in the room where he had again taken up transcribing tales from Unciel’s travels, now that winter had set in. 

As Unciel’s strength returned at a snail’s slow, steady creep, by silent agreement they took turns performing the simple tasks that went into maintaining a home: one day, Unciel cooked and Euan watched him while sweeping the kitchen floor; the next day, Unciel rested by a window overlooking his garden shrouded in white, and conversed occasionally with the raven, while Euan untangled the brambles of Unciel’s handwriting and the cat sat by his elbow and peered at his parchments, obstructing his attempts to dip his quill in the inkpot. 

Every once in a while, Unciel would ask Euan in a quiet and polite tone to try lighting a candle or fetching an implement from another room, and every time Euan knew he was not being asked to bring a lighted taper, or to walk from one room to another and use his hands to move objects around. Candles remained unlit and objects immobile in their places, no matter how hard he concentrated, except sometimes, when Unciel would lay his hand lightly on Euan’s shoulder and Euan would start at the touch and the discovery that the candle before him burned with a steady flame, or the volume of fruit-cordial recipes had displaced itself from the pantry to the table in Euan’s workroom.

The tail end of winter dragged on, as tail ends of things were wont to do, and dreams of unknown places continued to visit Euan: in his sleep, he trudged along roads through green and sunlit woods, he swam down wide, placid rivers, he burrowed sometimes deep below the earth’s surface. 

He never dreamed of performing magic, unless magic was what his travels as a bird, a mole, a salmon meant.

When the first twilight-purple crocuses pushed their way up through the snow, Unciel began to venture into the garden on his own, a little deeper among the garden beds every day, bending laboriously to touch fragile leaves and shoots, to clear away the old snow and the frozen topsoil with his fingers. As spring arrived, first creeping closer and then rushing in all at once in great leaps and bounds, Unciel walked, bent, even knelt, a trovel in his right hand, supporting his weight on his left hand, his fingers sunk into the softening ground. Through the window of his workroom, Euan watched Unciel in the garden, forgetting that time slipped past until the cat butted its head against his leg to remind him, or his stomach growled and he realized he was late getting started with lunch.

At the end of the first full day of spring – the first which started out fresh and cool, quickly warmed up, and remained warm and replete with the buzzing of bees and the quiet rustle of growing things till well after sunset – Euan and Unciel lingered over their evening meal. Unciel had cooked that day, and Euan had opened a bottle of raspberry wine left over from the previous summer. Seduced by the beverage’s sweet taste and scent, Euan nodded a bit over his glass, the warmth of the kitchen and the tranquility of Unciel’s presence folded around him like petals.

“Have you ever heard of Raine?” Unciel asked.

Euan roused himself and racked his brains. The name evoked nothing in him, he had never encountered it in anything he’d read or transcribed, not even in the wooden chest filled with Unciel’s memories. 

“What is it, or who?”

“A land far away, farther than even I have traveled. The Twelve Crowns of Raine, each crown as unlike the others as the starry sky is unlike my garden or the forests of Serre.”

Euan raised his glass to his lips, put it down without drinking more. In his heart, suspicion twined with certainty and twisted: he remembered what it was to be afraid, and realized he had not felt thus in some months.

“You wish to resume your travels?” he asked, hoping his voice did not tremble. 

Unciel’s eyes found his. “It is the nature of a wizard to go off, wandering here and there, seeing what he might learn along the way.”

Euan pushed away his glass, resisting the urge to fling it to the kitchen floor like a thwarted child. “Well, I am no wizard.” 

He wondered if the scriptorium would take him back and what Proctor Verel would say. He wondered if Unciel might let him stay, and keep his house, and feed his cat and his raven until he returned. He wondered if he could bear to live here with Unciel gone. 

“Alone, I would not get very far.” Unciel’s expression was wry. “My desire for travel remains stronger than my body, I fear. But with someone to keep me company, to strengthen my magic and share my wonder and write down our adventures…”

He trailed off, his expression open and kind. He hoped for a yes, but he would accept a no, Euan saw, and for just a moment, Euan felt some of the power that wizards must take for granted: the power to hold another’s heart in his hands. 

“It may be unfair of me to spoil the story so, but I should mention that the royal palace of Raine is said to contain the greatest library in all the world.” Unciel’s voice was soft, but his smile was knowing.

Euan closed his eyes, took a deep breath. The fire in the grate crackled, a sudden spring shower flung itself against the window, and the cat brushed against his calf. Unciel’s silence pressed softly against his eyelids, waiting for his decision. With a sudden, brief pain like a dagger entering his heart, Euan could not imagine ever leaving this house, but he had read enough poetry to know that a home was a place that would always wait for his return, in which there would be room for everything he brought back from his travels.

He opened his eyes and saw his answer reflected, dawning, on Unciel’s face. 

“I have been dreaming about traveling, an unimaginable distance,” Euan said like a confession, thinking of the castle he had seen in his dream in early winter, carved out of and into a seaside cliff, formidable and welcoming. He guessed that Unciel must have seen his dreams, and felt vaguely ashamed of never having mentioned them.

Unciel nodded. “Dreams, stories, magic. Like the parts of a plant, who can say where a root stops and a stem, a leaf, a flower begins?” 

Euan had lived his life in books, but in his mind’s eye, he saw himself stepping through the front door of Unciel’s house, like he was going to the market for salt and honey and candles, only this time he saw how the cobbled street did not stop at the market square but ran on, through the city gates, becoming a road through wheat fields and orchards, through glades and hills dotted with long-haired cattle, as far as the shore of the sea, the sails of waiting ships bellying out in the wind, and the path running on, across the tossing waves, a high road for porpoises to follow. A breeze like the one always felt at dawn, when the light was both grey and honeyed and the world seemed to hold its breath before the day began, came rushing back all that way while Euan paused on the threshold, and bathed his face in the mingled scents of salt, charcoal, horse tack, strange foods, and stranger places. 

Euan inhaled, his hands folded on the kitchen table and his body still in his chair, yet his whole self poised on the threshold of Unciel’s house, pierced through by desire and a strange, sweet fearfulness: not fear which paralyzed and stripped one of knowledge, name, and self, but the fear a fledgling hawk felt at the edge of a mountain precipice, just before it spread its wings and shrugged off the earth. 

Unciel’s fingers encircled Euan’s wrist and tugged him back into his body. “Don’t leave without me,” Unciel said softly, kindly. 

Euan opened his eyes, refocused on the kitchen, Unciel’s face, the warmth of his fingers. The scribe knew that he would carry this kitchen, with the hearth, the cat, the raven, the dried mushrooms and herbs, with him across fields and mountains and oceans, and that knowledge made him even more eager to leave at once, before dawn, to meet that breeze full of promise on the road. He felt reckless and invincible with the joy of anticipation.

Euan smiled, his pulse beating steady against Unciel’s palm. “We should leave soon,” he said. “Before midsummer, as soon as sailing season starts.”


End file.
